The Whitney Art Party

As it turns out, supporters of the Whitney Museum of American Art have all sorts of reasons to love its new building. “Okay, this is so weird, but I love the floors,” said Art Production Fund executive director Casey Fremont Crowe while riding in the elevator at the museum’s Art Party last night. It was the first iteration of the Whitney’s annual fete in the new building. “The old building had concrete, and there was something about the noise and how it felt to walk on that. But here, it’s like this beautiful wood, and it just sounds so perfect, you know what I mean?” continued Fremont Crowe with a giggle of excitement as she stepped off the elevator and onto the fifth floor for an after-hours look at the new Frank Stella exhibit. The mega-size, Technicolor works made for excellent Instagram fodder in the absence of the museum’s usual crowds.

The evening had begun with an intimate candlelit dinner on the eighth floor, which included the likes of Jennifer Fisher, Michelle Smith, and Maria Giulia Maramotti of Max Mara, which underwrote the evening. “We wanted to keep dinner to just about 80, to keep it intimate,” said cochair Patrick McGregor. “But don’t worry, there’s about 800 people downstairs.” Not that you could have noticed—it must be those sound-absorbing floors Fremont Crowe had been talking about.

As guests trickled down after dinner to the main floor, they could see that McGregor wasn’t kidding. The entire place was filled wall-to-wall with people ranging from Bronson van Wyck and Andreja Pejic to DJ Harley Viera-Newton and designer Ariana Rockefeller.

But despite the huge crowd of art patrons and partygoers, one guest managed to stand out: Flora Irving, great-great-granddaughter of Gertrude Whitney herself. She stunned in a vintage Christian Dior Couture black dress, finished with a swath of gold silk wrapped around her shoulders. “I love how despite the huge uptick in traffic since this building opened, the museum has kept a really intimate feeling,” she said. “It all reminds me of something my grandmother says: ‘The Whitney isn’t a place; it’s an idea.’”